An RT-award-winning literary agent with 20 years experience in numerous genres opens up about her experience and adventures in publishing and the world beyond it.

Friday, September 19, 2014

Sandy Lu Loves Murder, Mystery & Mayhem

Murder, Mystery and Mayhem—Why I love Suspense and Thriller

It all started when I was in fifth grade. A publisher in
Taiwan, where I grew up, released a new translation of the complete Sherlock
Holmes stories for young readers. I begged my parents for the whole set for my
birthday and devoured them all within the month. Next came the entire
collection of Maurice LeBlanc’s Arsene Lupin mysteries, which I bought with my own
savings. I was hooked for good.

I consumed every mystery and suspense novel I could get my
hands on after that: anything by Agatha Christie, G. K. Chesterton, Georges
Simenon, Erle Stanley Gardner, Philip MacDonald, Ross MacDonald, and John
Dickson Carr, all before I turned fourteen.

For years I knew Edgar Allan Poe only as the creator of the
world’s first detective, C. Auguste Dupin, Gaston Leroux as the author of The Mystery of the Yellow Room (until I
discovered he also wrote Phantom of the
Opera after seeing the musical fifteen years later), and my ideal man was a
composite of the charming gentleman thief Arsene Lupin, Leslie Charteris’ suave
adventurer Simon Templar (a.k.a The Saint), the hyper-intellectual professor
Ellery Queen, and S. S. Van Dine’s bon vivant sleuth, Philo Vance.

My parents started to worry when I began to talk about how
death by carbon monoxide would leave one with rosy cheeks, how pure nicotine
was colorless and could kill in an instant with no trace, and how movies never
portrayed death by hanging realistically since the dead man’s tongue should
have been sticking out of his mouth in reality. They decided to send me to a
boarding school so I could learn to socialize with other girls and live in “the
real world” for a change.

As I grew older, my reading list expanded to include horror,
science fiction and fantasy, historical fiction, literary fiction, and
non-fiction, but mystery/thriller/suspense is still my first love and favorite
genre. Reading about murders is a great escape from my otherwise very ordinary
life. No matter how gruesome they are—whether the victims are stabbed, shot,
poisoned, bludgeoned, drowned, hung, burned, frozen, gassed, buried alive, or mawed
by an animal—they are as comforting to me as lullabies.

The violence and blood do not bother me because I know they
are not real (I can never read true crimes unless they’re about events far
removed from recent history.) I see them as great intellectual exercises, separating
clues from red herrings and solving the intricate puzzles before the truth is
revealed by the author the ultimate satisfaction. Many of my clients tell me I
have a very analytical brain, which helps them see the holes and flaws in their
books. They have my mystery novels to thank.

Another reason why I love suspense fiction is that the best
of them are all about character and motivation. What makes people kill? Do
certain situations people find themselves in force them to take drastic
measures, no matter who they are? Given the same circumstances, why are some
people driven to destruction and not others?

Character and motivation are the foundations of any good
novel, but they are especially important in mystery and thriller. Not only must
the plot make sense, the motive behind the crime also has to be convincing. No matter
how tangled the plot, if the motive is weak, the whole thing will fall apart. More
than any other genre, a good crime novel must lay each building block just
right to achieve the domino effect, and one misplaced tile will be the premature
end of the game.

After I became an agent, I realized that this fascination
with understanding what makes us tick must have been the reason why I majored
in psychology and sociology in college and later went on to pursue a Ph.D. in
social and personality psychology. While I never discovered the answers in grad
school, I found them once and again in every good crime fiction I’ve ever read.

Here are a few of my favorites--some are richly atmospheric,
some dazzle with evocative prose, some inject new life into a tired set-up, and
some might not even be considered crime fiction in its strictest sense—but all
of them introduced vividly complicated and damaged characters who haunted me
long after I turned the last page.